Support of Anti-Putin America for Pussy Riot ‘Disgusting and Ridiculous’ (Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia)

Is American sympathy for a band of young women who chose a church to express disillusionment with Vladimir Putin just the latest reflection of bias against a resurgent Russia? For Komsomolskaya Pravda, columnist Alexei Pankin lashes out at America and the West for mismanaging the Soviet collapse, its long-held suspicion of Putin, and most of all, widespread U.S. and Western support for Pussy Riot – a female punk band that Putin has made an example of by putting members of the group behind bars.

The entire period of Putin’s rule has been a continuous series of propaganda campaigns by Western mass media, NGOs, and American Congressmen against a president popular among Russians. The campaigns range from pinning personal responsibility on Putin for the demise of the Kursk [nuclear submarine] to accusations of murdering [KGB defector] Alexandr Litvinenko.

So now the global buzz is about the “cheap whores” [Pussy Riot]. This is such a farce, that it is not only disgusting, but ridiculous. One suspects either collective dementia or complete venality of the Western democracies.

“This universal howl over “rabid female genitalia” [another Russian rendering of Pussy Riot] could have been trumped up only with a massive PR investment. Now even such pillars of free press as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times are comparing the “pussies” to Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Putin to Stalin.” This was written by Eduard Lozanskii, president of the American University in Moscow and a Soviet dissident with a more than tumultuous anti-Soviet biography. It isn’t clear whether to laugh or cry to see shining through the centuries-old tradition of the democratic West the sly mug of [exiled oligarch] Boris Abramovich Berezovsky.